Karl Rove On The State Of Play Re: The Contested Convention

[Valin]

Hugh Hewitt Show:

Hugh Hewitt

Thursday, March 31, 2016

 

Audio

 

(Snip)

 

HH: So Karl Rove, I want to start with very inside baseball, which is Rule 40. On this show yesterday, Ted Cruz said it’s a rule, it would be wrong to parachute in people to change it from Washington, D.C. insiders. It’s only Trump and me. And I thought to myself, oh, they’re going to actually run this convention. What do you think of that strategy of trying to hang onto Rule 40?

 

KR: Well, Rule 40B…

 

HH: To be specific, yeah.

 

KR: What it is, yeah, look, and he misinterprets it. Rule 40B says that in order to have your name officially placed in nomination with a speech and seconding speeches, you have to have the majority of delegates in a certain number of states. I believe it’s eight states. But it does not say that those are the only candidates that you can vote for. This was an attempt to, in 2012, and the rules committee just before the convention proposed this rule, because Ron Paul said I want to have, I don’t have a chance at winning. I’ve got 5% of the vote. I’ve got delegates from a couple of states where I dominate, but I want to be able to have a full blown nomination speech and speak to the country, and chew up valuable prime time TV. So what they said is okay, you can vote for anybody you want, and those votes will be tallied and counted. But we’re not going to have everybody that wants to be nominated be able to be nominated. You’ve got to show a certain level of support. So Senator Cruz is wrong. There is no rule on the Republican Party side that says that you have to be formally nominated in order to have people receive votes. I mean, people can get, Carly Fiorina has a delegate. She’ll be, and whoever that delegate is, is going to be able to vote for Carly Fiorina on the first ballot, because they’re bound to them. Ben Carson has delegates. Marco Rubio has delegates. John Kasich has delegates. Jeb Bush has delegates. They can all have those delegate bound to them, and remain bound to them, and vote for them, on them, even though their name is not placed in nomination.

 

HH: How interesting. So there is no, you aren’t disqualified? Well, then, Senator Cruz is doing a very shrewd thing. He’s defining the controversy before the controversy is actually investigated and defined.

 

KR: Yeah.

 

(Snip)

 

HH: And I’m amazed, Rove, that no one has actually, you haven’t been on air talking about this, because you know the answers to stuff that people are going to be asking. Here’s the key question. If Donald Trump is the nominee, how do you recover from a 30% favorable/63% unfavorable, as you note in your column today?

 

KR: Look, I don’t think it’s possible. You know, he claims that he can be presidential when he needs to be. If he wants to change those numbers, he ought to start acting in a presidential manner, whatever he thinks that is, because right now, his numbers are abysmal. I mean, 30%, no one has ever been nominated for president with numbers this bad. And nobody has ever won the presidency with numbers anywhere near this bad by the time of the election. Now maybe the numbers are pliable for him. I doubt it. But he’d better show us some evidence by July 18th that he can change these numbers. He may be popular inside the Republican Party, though he has only gotten an average of 37% of the votes. But among general election voters, he’s more than 2-2-1 negative.

 

HH: Is Ted Cruz much more electable?

 

KR: Well, the polls would indicated that he is somewhat more electable. He looked a lot more electable earlier in the year. But now, he is, along with Trump, fallen behind Hillary Clinton in the polling on a pretty regular basis. But you could make the case that he lacks the misogynist comments, and the four bankruptcies and all these other things that are causing trouble for Donald Trump. But yes, he is more electable.

 

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